Interview (Part 2): Rob Meyer and Luke Matheny

When I saw the trailer for the movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything, I immediately sought out its filmmakers: Writer-director Rob Meyer and writer Luke Matheny. It’s a wonderful story starring some terrific young talent as well as Oscar winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley. The movie comes out in theaters and on VOD this Friday, March 21.

In Part 2, Rob and Luke discuss some of the key creative choices they made for the movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything:

Scott: Birding is an interesting subculture. How much research did you do on birding?

Rob: We did a lot, and that was partly due to the fact that it took so long to get the film made, honestly. We worked on this script for two to three years, not full-time, but certainly on and off, and it gave us the time to go birding. I think that’s probably the best piece of research we could do — to go out with people who know what they’re doing and see how they bird.

For instance, I learned that you bird with your ears first. You hear something and then you track it using your ears until you find it visually. And you learn the different calls of different birds, how to use binoculars and how to not get dizzy and seasick while trying to search around for a bird.

Also, the type of people who are birders is I think pretty widely misunderstood. I think there are some old stereotypes still kicking around. I learned this especially going out with the Young Birder Society of New York State, which is a pretty thriving organization of teen birders in New York. There were kids of all types. There were definitely shy kids, but there were definitely some really outgoing, artistic kids who are into music and they’re in bands. There were some romances budding within the group. I think the documentary “Birding: A Central Park Effect” got this across pretty well, too.

Then finally, we got birding experts to read our scripts a number of times, Kenn Kaufman being the most famous. He’s a famous birder who is sort of a rock star among young birders in particular because he left his home at age 16 to hitchhike around the country in the ’70s to look for birds and wrote a beautiful memoir called “Kingbird Highway” about it. So he was the perfect expert to read our script. He, along with an outstanding ornithologist named Morgan Tingley, fixed all the little details that we got wrong.

Scott: Was Kenn the inspiration for the Konrad character?

Rob: We had the character before we met Kenn. Kenn is actually a much cooler person than the Konrad character, who is a bit of a cautionary tale, in my opinion.

But knowing that there were these cult birding figures out there… Konrad was actually loosely based on a famous animal behavioralist that I loved growing up named Konrad Lorenz. It’s a bit of a wordplay, calling him Lawrence Konrad. So that’s how that character started.

Scott: The story revolves around these three boys, primarily David, the protagonist, and his friends Timmy and Peter. Could you describe those three characters? What would you want readers to know, shorthand, about those characters and their group dynamic?

Luke: It’s three characters who have been friends for a long time. They are sophomores in high school and the bulk of their relationship revolves around birding and other school activities. They’re very close, but it’s also a transitional time. David, who is the least outwardly geeky of the three, is a little bit the odd man out, because his mother just died.

Rob: They fit a bit of the model — because I’m a geek — of Luke Skywalker, R2D2 and C3PO. There’s a conservative member, a fun-loving member, and then the protagonist who’s dealing with a struggle and a loss.

Someone who interviewed me recently about it told me that he thought the characters don’t actually seem super-close, which I never really thought about, but actually they are the sort of friends which you get that are based on your interests in high school and not necessarily picking people that you 100 percent can communicate with and relate to, like the type of friends you might get more in college or right after college. In a way there is a little bit of a distance between them.

Luke: Certainly the rules of friendship formation in high school are a little more arbitrary than they are later in life, I think. You pick your friends a little more carefully as you get older.

Scott: Yeah, I picked up on that, too. They’re all members of this Young Birders Society, yet they have their own distinctive personality types as well as their own agendas. They go on a journey, a hero’s journey, in a way, and each one of them has their own little arc. Did you think about this at all?

Rob: Definitely. This is my first screenplay, so I wanted all the help I could get to make sure it would work. One of the books that really helped me was “The Writer’s Journey” by Christopher Vogel, which relies on the hero’s journey.

I was a little hesitant to “follow a formula” or use a book to understand how the structure of a narrative would work. But the book came recommended to me from a classmate of ours, Mark Heyman, who works with Darren Aronofsky and it helped him in writing Black Swan, which I don’t think anyone would call formulaic.

That gave me a lot of faith that we could find our own voice and our own journey within the hero’s journey or the writer’s journey. But yes, we wanted each character, all the boys and Ellen and the dad, to have an arc, certainly not to just be puppets within David’s journey.

And we wanted it to be a road trip. They’re literally going into the woods, which is a metaphor for going into your inner subconscious and dealing with some memories and issues that you may avoid in your ordinary world. Yeah, we weren’t trying to do a minimalist experimental film, because I think we really wanted it to work in a classical film structure.

Luke: I think we also knew that the main characters’ arcs would also have a bittersweet quality in the sense that we suggest that the characters may not be best friends for the rest of their lives. To that extent, Stand by Me was certainly an influence with us. We always thought about that line “You never have the kind of friends like you did when you were 12.”

Rob: And the end of Stand by Me, when the grown up Gordy is learning about the death of one of his old friends, and he thinks about how far apart they’ve drifted over the years, there is both a sadness and an acceptance of the fact that our adult selves are different from our kid selves.

There’s a little bit of a mourning — that adolescence has a finite period and then it’s going to be over and we’re going to one day look back on it and have to remember it, like you’d remember a loved one who passed away. Not to get too melancholy, but certainly we wanted to build that in, because there’s a poignancy to childhood I personally don’t think is unrelated to coping with loss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cup5DCy3cP0

Scott: Let’s talk about that because the movie does deal with death and this idea of loss. There’s a line, actually in Aquarium, where the David character asks Ellen, “Have you ever seen anything die before? It’s pretty different from everything else.”

It changes in terms of its meaning and context in A Birder’s Guide to Everything in that David has experienced significant personal loss eighteen months before we meet him at the start of the movie. His father is moving on while David is not. His father’s actually preparing to get remarried.

This is something David is just refusing to acknowledge, really resisting. How did that develop where you went from Aquarium, the idea of this kid essentially drowning this dog, to Birder’s, where death happened to the protagonist and he’s trying to deal with it?

Rob: Yeah, that’s a really great question and I’m glad you picked up on that. That line of David’s in Aquarium was for me kind of the thesis of that movie. And in this movie, that realization was always going to stem from the protagonist witnessing the death of an animal. This is a spoiler alert, but the duck that they’re looking for gets shot, and David has to watch it get its neck snapped in front of him.

That scene was the one I was concerned that we got right, both to set it up as writers and also to execute it as director. The character did lose his mother, but in my mind, he hasn’t finished processing that emotion, and it will probably take him his whole life to, but seeing something die in front of him, seeing that duck die and having to face that harsh reality. I’m sure David had a traumatic moment at the moment of his mom’s death, but in my mind, since then, he has been in a numb denial state and didn’t have the right people to talk about it, didn’t have the right people to cry with about it with. It’s not his dad; it’s not Timmy and Peter. And we made those characters a little un-empathetic on purpose to make David feel as isolated as we could, so that the character of Ellen, and Konrad, became more important as people he felt like he could open up to.

So I actually think the themes feel pretty similar, only the stakes are just much higher in Birders.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Rob and Luke reveal some of the key issues they had to confront in developing the script.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Rob is repped by WME and Apostle Management.

Luke is repped by Paradigm.

Comment Archive